1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ink-jet recording apparatus that ejects ink to a record medium.
2. Description of Related Art
One of known heads of ink-jet recording apparatuses has a large number of nozzles that eject ink, pressure chambers that communicate with the respective nozzles, and actuators that correspond to the respective pressure chambers. When an actuator is driven, a pressure chamber corresponding to this actuator is reduced in volume, so that ink is ejected through a corresponding nozzle. In this type of head, when ink left within the nozzles dries and increases in viscosity or when foreign matters such as dust, air bubbles, etc. are mixed into ink, ink-flow within the head is deteriorated and thus ink ejection may see drawbacks.
In order to maintain or restore good ink ejection performance, one of known techniques adopts head maintenance in which a face of a head having nozzles formed therein (i.e., an ink ejection face of the head) is sealed with a cap (which means a “capping”) so that ink left within the nozzles can be prevented from drying up or in which ink having high viscosity or containing foreign matters is forcibly sucked and discharged from the nozzles (which is called a “purge operation”), and the like (see Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 9-123470).
In this technique, two maintenance members, i.e., a cap and an ink suction member, are movable by a moving mechanism that includes rollers disposed to surround the heads in a vertical direction and a looped belt that spans the rollers to circle around the heads. The cap and the ink suction member disposed adjacent to each other are mounted on the belt, so that as the belt travels they move around the heads. When the belt and the rollers, which form a mechanism for moving a maintenance member, are disposed around the heads in the aforementioned manner, a size of the ink-jet recording apparatus with respect to the vertical direction, i.e., a direction perpendicular to the ink ejection face, is increased. In the aforementioned technique, even if the maintenance members do not move around the heads but move straight along a direction parallel to the ink ejection face, the two maintenance members are still mounted on the belt to be adjacent to each other in a longitudinal direction of the belt, and thus a relatively large space with respect to the direction parallel to the ink ejection face is required for these two members (e.g., a space where these two members stay without confronting the ink ejection faces of the heads during a printing operation and a space for movement of the members in head maintenance). In this case, therefore, a size of the ink-jet recording apparatus with respect to the direction parallel to the ink ejection face is inevitably increased.